After a series of false starts and a pair of eye-opening reports about dysfunctional studio culture, Amazon Game Studios finally appears to have a hit on its hands in “New World,” a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game whose fantastical world draws on colonial America — rather than J.R.R. Tolkien — for aesthetic inspiration. Now that the game is out, players are working overtime to probe its depths, which has resulted in a disappointing discovery: They can’t name themselves “Jeff Bezos.”

At “New World’s” character creation screen, naming yourself “Jeff Bezos,” Amazon’s founder, produces a brief message: “This name cannot be used.” As PC gaming publication Rock Paper Shotgun discovered, numerous variations like “Jeffrey B. Zos,” “Jeff Bezoos” and “Jeff Bezozs” are also not allowed (Jeff Bezos — as opposed to Jeffrey B. Zos, Jeff Bezoos and Jeff Bezozs — also owns The Washington Post). “Amazon” is blocked as well, as is the name of its current CEO, Andy Jassy. All the other names currently listed on Amazon’s officers and directors page, as well as names of prominent current employees such as former White House press secretary Jay Carney, are not filtered.

While Amazon Game Studios did not reply to a request for comment on why it elected to block these specific names, Amazon Games’s naming policy states that players should not “impersonate any individual or entity, including employees or representatives of Amazon.” The policy goes on to say that players are also barred from using “misspellings, alternate spellings, or combinations of words, symbols, and letters” to get around this policy.

As video game news site Kotaku points out, a player who participated in “New World’s” prerelease closed beta test named herself “AmazonOfficial” and filled in-game chat with messages critical of Amazon’s labor practices.

And yet, some players have successfully transported Bezos’s moniker to a magical realm where nobody is allowed to have his name. On the “New World” subreddit, one user posted a screenshot of a character named “JeffrieBezos” with the caption: “Found him, boys.” In the thread, other players reported seeing variants of Bezos’s name on multiple servers.

In The Post’s own experiments, this reporter discovered that players are so desperate to mold themselves into Bezos’s likeness that, for example, numerous variations on every line from “Bezos I,” a satirical song from comedian Bo Burnam’s Netflix special “Inside,” have already been claimed as names by other players, including “ceo entrepreneur” and “cmon jeff get him.” The names “Mark Zuckerberg” and “Elon Musk” are apparently allowed but already taken. Until several minutes ago, “Befffrey Jezos” was not taken, but now it is. How that happened is a mystery.

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